Introducing The Story of Money: They are history’s geniuses. But were they any good at investing?
FT News Briefing
Forhecz Topher
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 2 May 2026
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Introducing a new video podcast from the FT: Does scientific, artistic or political brilliance translate into investing success? It’s a topical question with hedge funds today accused of sucking talent away from the rest of the economy. So, the FT’s Gillian Tett and Robin Wigglesworth sat down with reporter Toby Nangle, who has dug into the archives to assess the investment portfolios of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, John Maynard Keynes and other widely regarded geniuses of the past. What Toby found may surprise you, as will the historical wildcard he’s unearthed.
To enjoy future episodes, be sure to subscribe to The Story of Money wherever you get your podcasts, also on the show's dedicated YouTube channel here.
Learn more at ft.com/tsom
Want more?
Read Toby’s full FT article here.
Toby’s sources:
On Churchill: https://www.amazon.co.uk/No-More-Champagne-Churchill-Money/dp/1784081817
On J.M.W. Turner: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5718586
On John Maynard Keynes: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2023011
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2287262
On Jane Austen: https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/vol36no1/toran/
Hosts: Gillian Tett and Robin Wigglesworth
Guest: Toby Nangle
Producer: Lulu Smyth
Senior Producers: Michela Tindera and Laurence Knight
Executive Producers: Flo Phillips and Manuela Saragosa
Original music: Breen Turner
Broadcast engineers: Bianca Wakeman and Petros Giuompasis
Podcast Development: Laura Clarke
FT Global Head of Audio: Cheryl Brumley
Video editor: Josh Divney at Podcast Discovery
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey guys, it's Mark. I want to take a moment to share an episode of a brand new video podcast from the Financial Times. It's called The Story of Money. It's hosted by my FT colleagues, columnist Gillian Tett, and Alphaville editor Robin Wigglesworth, who have both been on the briefing many, many times. The story of money is a history show for finance geeks and a finance show for history buffs, |
| 0:24.4 | and if you're neither, well, Gillian and Robin might just make you both. |
| 0:29.6 | In the episode we're sharing today, Robin, Gillian, and F.T. reporter Toby Nangle discuss whether some of history's great minds, from Winston Churchill to Isaac Newton, also made for great investors. |
| 0:36.8 | If you like what you hear, you can find new episodes |
| 0:38.7 | every Wednesday on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy. |
| 0:44.8 | I want to talk about Winston Churchill. What kind of investor was he? It really kind of |
| 0:49.2 | makes you a skin crawl some of the things that he got up to along the way. He was given this advance that was worth close to over £7 million in inflation-adjusted |
| 0:58.7 | or close to £80 million in GDP-adjusted terms. |
| 1:02.3 | He lost it all. |
| 1:03.2 | Oh, wow. |
| 1:04.0 | You lost it all in the crash in the stock market? |
| 1:07.1 | No, no, just trading. |
| 1:08.2 | There were these nine trading days ending the 18th of October, |
| 1:12.0 | where he really went into overdrive. He traded $620,000 worth of stock, you know, 80 million |
| 1:20.5 | pounds worth adjusted for contemporary exchange rates. And that trading activity just saw him |
| 1:26.2 | completely wiped out. |
| 1:36.2 | Hello and welcome to the story of money, the brand new podcast from the Financial Times |
| 1:41.3 | where we rummaged through the past to make sense of the financial |
| 1:45.0 | present and sometimes the future too. Yep, because if there's one thing that Fineless has taught us, |
| 1:51.7 | it's that people keep making the same silly mistakes. And these days we might use Bloomberg, |
| 1:57.3 | terminals, spreadsheets and special purpose vehicles, but you can get into just as much |
| 2:02.3 | hilarious trouble with a simple abacist. I'm Gillian Tet, an anthropologist turned FD columnist, |
... |
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